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Art Texts Pics is an online magazine published both in Italian and in English. Established in 2010, Art Texts Pics contains interviews, conversations, essays, exhibition previews and event agendas. The magazine covers both well known, institutional realities – such as museum exhibitions, established galleries and foundations – and alternative, young spaces.

The seventeen young artists participating to the workshop, coming from the most different educations and countries, worked on their interaction with the surrounding world, in particular with the special environment of the lake and its presence, discreet but important...

The end of July corresponds every year with the end of CSAV – Artists Research Laboratory at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Como, regular appointment of workshop for young artists coming from all over the world, guided by a prominent international artist. The CSAV, a residency conceived for young artists with no restriction on nationality, takes place every year at Villa Sucota, headquarter of Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Como, and always opens up a relationship among the artists and the city. Visiting Professor of this year has been Renée Green, Afro-American artist, writer and film-maker, whose work is focused in particular on the “remains” of memory, characteristics that stay and the ones that are lost, and how these details form collective and individual consciousness of entire generations. The theme of XXII CSAV, Cinematic Migrations, is a wide-range consideration on cinema, its revolutions and the countless sides that it took on, through the different technological possibilities of contemporary moving images.

As usual, there were a lot of different public appointment on the occasion of the CSAV; on July 7th the Visiting Professor Renée Green held a conference, which title was Other Planes of There, talking of her artistic practice, which was followed by the screening, on the occasion of Lake Como Film Festival, of her film Endless Dreams and Water Between?, focused on the narration of migration and origins through the epistolary dialogue of four women. To follow, on July 14th, opened Tracing, Green’s solo exhibition, located in the cultural space Antonio Ratti, in the former church of San Francesco. The exhibition, which features audio works, videos and a “space poetry” installation – Space Poem #6 (Tracing), a series of colorful fabric banners specifically realized for the occasion –, develops around the observation of the former church architecture and the visible signs of its changes along the centuries, trying to relate these considerations with the parallel formation of body and soul of the human being through his multiple pasts and the never-ending attempts to make reality uniform with dreams and expectations. Through the reflection on time, place and architecture, Green tries to answer to different questions: what are we inheriting, what are we building, what is changing through time and what are we losing in its passing, depending on the different conditions we live in? Which traces do these changes leave? The exhibition will be open until September 10th.

The seventeen young artists participating to the workshop, coming from the most different educations and countries, worked on their interaction with the surrounding world, in particular with the special environment of the lake and its presence, discreet but important; the outcome of this analysis was exhibited with the works by the participants during Corso Aperto, the traditional presentation day of the results of the workshop, that took place on July 20th at Villa del Grumello (with an interesting “intrusion” inside the renovated park of Villa Sucota and its greenhouses). The relationship with the lake and its environment was made visible in very different ways: from installations composed by leaves of the trees of the gardens around the lake shores to tied fishing rods, images realised through the exposition to lake water, videos about Ugo Foscolo and Marcel Duchamp projected in the dock area of the villa, fabrics printed with natural images and sounds collected in the parks, performance voted to body and mind relax with lake view, “pieces” of Villa del Grumello “on a trip” used in a video that tells us water stories far away in the space and still other installations. The artists of this year workshop were: Bogdán Ablozhnyy (Russia), Maria Cruz Alarcon Lopez (Chile), Sebastião Borges Figueiredo Ascenso Pires (Portugal), Antonia Brown (South Africa), Elliot Chaplin (U.S.A.), Ruann Coleman (South Africa), Jake Davidson (U.S.A.), Caterina De Nicola (Italy), Antonio Della Guardia (Italy), Euridice Kala (Mozambique), Vilje Kern Vestenfor (Norway), Lap-See Lam (Sweden), Rafael Medeiros (Brazil), Ryts Monet (Italy), Maia Nichols (U.S.A.), Mirka Sulander (Finland), Matti Sumari (Finland), Luca Vanello (Italy).

After Corso Aperto, last appointment of CSAV 2016 was, on July 21st, the conference The image in Migration by Kobena Mercer, Professor of Art History and Afro-American Studies at Yale University, which explored the concept of movement created by migration and the networks that take place inside this phenomenon, starting from the narrative structure of the migrations we can observe in Renée Green’s films.